Disorder is the natural order of the Universe: infinite, cold, chaotic, unpredictable, ruling the world by its perpetual disequilibrium and creating billions of possibilities. Conversely, as a matter of awareness and progress, order is just a temporary moment of contradictory disorders coming to a balanced state.

Man has created tools for power, a global system of disruption of life deploying his domination upon living and animal worlds. Despite all our efforts and the incredible level of progress that our society has reached, disorder has ceased to be seen as a potential opportunity to challenge the present. It has instead become a component of a consumerist system that burns through natural resources and hinders our exclusive growth.

Facing growing signs of predictable extinction, mankind seems more than ever ignoring them, answering to this structural and collective failure by creating new disorders in the natural processes: fighting for immortality modifying life, abusing animals and living worlds, burning resources against diversity, communicating more than ever creating confusion in identity, bringing biotechnology, global consumption, creating permanent state of war, climate change, crisis as a response.

This photographic work delivers disrupting images that document signs of this future in our present.

The title « Disorder (The living equation) » is coming from a 1934 book from Nathan Schachner, a fiction where the character creates a equation which its goal is to allow them not to solve equations but to create new ones.

An Augmented archive of 166 portraits issued from 6 black and white silver gelatin rolls negatives found in the ground between the pavement, revealing the portraits of young africans and soldiers from another time.

The exhibition device organises this archive into a photographic project where XIXth century portrait album medallions play a combinatory role with a colored Portuguese flag and new countries issued from liberation movements, colorful posters, postcards and a fake promotional video tale.

ULTRAMAR (Empire Travel Club) transforms the exhibition space into a travel agency from an Empire in the past that doesn’t exist anymore. Everything present mentally recreates this destination : depicting the unknown soldier’s intimate diary, thousand individual lives as thousands of free postcards to take away making collective memory, mixing past with present creating future and reframing history.

The sophisticated art of tracking is an art inherited from ancient times. Its urban counterpart, the night watch, has become my way of surveying the city, of defining its territory and thereby my own space.

The idea of wandering, of willingly giving in to the derisory stories of the city at nighttime, fueled this slightly macabre desire. This is the precise moment of the solar race in which these modern bachelor machines appear from the dark, exuberant prostheses and car trophies, which were able to infuse the spirit of Mad Max into industrial logic.

This art of augmenting has always sparked off in me an intense fascination as well as an immense fright.This absolute need to increase the production model, the modest car tuning, that of unnoticeable assemblies, of the small rear wing, of dark windows, of the chromed tailpipe and alloy wheels.

This is what fascinates me most. Under the protocol of random walking and the compulsive use of flash, I tracked down these urban utopias, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, constituting a voyeuristic archive of a mechanical flora, a symphorophile hunting passbook. I imagine their lives, their exploits and guess their inevitably imminent crash in the rattle and rumple of metal sheets.

The use of an ultra-fast 3200 ASA film only leaves an idea of forms, stripped of all color. An X-ray. Like a porn film that would have been shot by a machine.Frontal and without dialogues. I imagine their lives, their exploits and guess their inevitably imminent crash in the rattle and rumple of metal sheets.Sign of a chivalry whose order would have remained hidden from the world, these all-risk insured supercars remind us that a visual orgasm is an act of bravery.Car tuning is not a crime.

FICTIVES ARCHIVES , AN INVESTIGATION ON CONTEMPORARY IMAGES IN THE ERA OF THE LIQUID PHOTOGRAPHY. [ 2009 – 2011 ]

(UK)

Photography has born as a scientific reproduction tool of the reality and has been the strongest and the largest medium to construct modern history of the mankind but the statut of the photographic document as lost its authority with reality in its new relation with the digital world. Since photography switch into digital era, the truth we used to attached to this medium has disappeared. There is no more negative to prove chemically and mechanically that an event has really occurred. The change of the nature of photgraphy into an image brought deep distance between the fact itself and its representation.

Without image there is no event and any event could be built with images. Mass Consumption of images has created images to serve specific goal and to be recognized, modifying the production process from « taking » to « making » a picture. The space conquest have been focused all its energy in the construction of an heroic and mythic media exploit. Without any image of the first moon landing on the moon, nobody would have believed it.

With the possibility of creating a new event by its simple existence, Romaric Tisserand recreated since 2009 an unbelievable large format negatives fictives NASA archives of the unreleased Apollo 21 mission moon landing (which was planned but not released) the 18th June 1974 in order to construct and validate this event : moon rocks, survival kit, moon landscape, astronaut portrait, deep space imagery series are challenging our idea between photography and truth.

Lise Sarfati’s newest series, “Austin, Texas” was completed in 2008, as part of her trilogy on the United States which started with the series “The New Life”, published by Twin Palms in 2005 and continued with the series “Immaculate and She”, which will be published this year by Steidl Mack and as a portfolio in Aperture magazine. “Austin, Texas” was published in October 2008 by Magnum Publisher under the title “Lise Sarfati, Fashion Magazine”.

THE FICTIONAL DOCUMENT

In her work, Lise Sarfati makes no distinction between documentary and fiction. The choice of the city of Austin, Texas is anything but trivial: Austin is both the geographic center of the United States and the epicenter of the underground rock scene.

The series presents teenage characters operating in a familiar environment: that of Austin, with its wooden houses, its interiors, its streets and its muted colors.

SPACE AND THE BODY

Lise Sarfati’s work focuses on the relationship between the body and space. It is this continuous interaction of the characters within their space which structures her approach. She does not refer to her work as portraiture, but as a “study” of figures.

Quentin Bajac, Head of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, describes this phenomenon quite well: “All these girls are located in the ‘here and now’ of the picture and an indefinable elsewhere. This fundamental ubiquity is, to my mind, the reason for Sarfati’s interest in young models.[…] Each of these photos literally records the distance between a body and the space that surrounds it, and in that way, metaphorically (and this time very consciously) constructs a relationship between the model and the world around her.” (1)

NARRATIVE FASHION

Naïve and brutal, seemingly straight out of a novel, with powerful sensuality, reclined on an armchair in the family room, or roaming the streets of a possible Texan Eden, these young women have no purpose, no cause to fight, no clear action to explain their restless wandering. “The clothing always seems to have been chosen to match the model, and the logic is one of verisimilitude – each young woman projects a character she has chosen, but remains completely in harmony with her own natural context and setting. In accordance with Sarfati’s photographic maieutics, they’re full participants in the final photo’s mise en scène.[…] Thus the change induced by the closing has nothing in common with metamorphosis. It is even imperceptible sometimes. In any case, the clothing never seems to be a disguise under which the model disappears. (Quentin Bajac “Life Stills”)(2)

PERPETUAL ADOLESCENCE

Lise Sarfati’s approach is deeply rooted in the literary concept of permanent immaturity, described by writer Witold Gombrowicz. In his masterpiece Ferdydurke, the author states “youth was not for her a transitional period: for a modern person, it was the only period that was real in all of existence.” an idea Sarfati’s work continuously references.

Quentin Bajac again eloquently explains this fundamental contribution to the photographer’s work : “She likes to cite Gombrowicz and his fondness for the concept of immaturity – a secret revolt, a silent refusal, a game played with life and reality, and especially the idea of a subject both malleable and yet elusive, who always, in the end, slips away.”(3)

Lise Sarfati herself explains to Rick Owens in another interview on Fashion Magazine: “What interests me about American teenagers isn’t the social dimension. It’s adolescence from a more general view, as a metaphor, a transition, a mirror. »

DAILY ROMANCES

This undeniable contribution of literary work forged Sarfati’s perception and photographic practice, giving her a marked taste for storytelling. The artist is interested in the anti-heroic stories of teenagers from provincial cities in the USA.

Each of the three series are a transverse story; each evoking a new story that plunges us into literary imaginings. For Sarfati, photographic aesthetics are not built by the photographer’s eye, but by an accumulation of experiences and sensations that create a complex world, a unique history.

Romaric Tisserand

Paris, 5th January 2009

Lise Sarfati’s work is included in numerous public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Biblioteque Nationale de France in Paris. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at FOAM Amsterdam; the Domus Artium, Salamanca, Spain; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France; and the Nicolaj Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1996, the artist was awarded the Prix Niepce in Paris and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

In the search for anonymous images there is no beginning or end, nor rare images, only incandescent projections which subjugate and instantly become absolutely indispensable. AAnonymes.org is one of the many histories of contemporary photography.

AAnonymes.org shows “abandoned” photographs, antiquities of a reality that has ceased to exist in its original state, images which, like every photograph ever taken, have contributed to the creation of a photographically modified reality. The very images which Jean Baudrillard regarded as the prime instrument of the lack of reality, pictures of a contemporary world in which images are already pictures, in which everything has been fiction since Nicéphore Nièpce’s first heliograph.

When photography was officially born exactly 170 years ago, on 19 August 1839, the passage from the ancient to the modern world was consummated. AAnonymes.org is a tribute to this.

The Kodak Brownie was largely instrumental in photography’s democratisation and opened the way for modern photography, a photography catering for the masses, whose collective, immediate and simultaneous espousal transformed individual memories into objects that one can posses and the collective imagination into a veritable visual grammar.

One is struck today by the heritage (or debt) bequeathed, from the first Daguerreotypes and William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotypes to the anonymous pictures taken in the early 20th century and modern and contemporary photography. An exquisite corpse in which scratchings, asperities, superimpositions and montages constructed an unbridled imagination in which today’s imagery was already in gestation in the pictures of the past.

AAnonymes does not seek to tell a story of photography but rather propose any number of stories, to open itself up to an experimental reading free of historic pretention, to the meaning in which all these approaches would coexist.

For a long time these authorless photographs, images of unclaimed paternity left to the anarchy of personal or commercial mythology, often altered, torn or annotated, have been denied the constitutive qualities of authenticity, legibility and precision.

What has always struck me about the portraits is the modernity of some of the faces. In the landscapes it is their universal silence, and in the still lifes their absence of effect and delicate visual sparseness. Faces, landscapes transfixed by life.

“You press the button, we do the rest” – Kodak

The product of permanent choices involving accidents and formal rapprochements, this proposition is as valid as all other possible propositions since it potentially contains all of them. Images are signs, each anonymous image is a visual citation, a unique and complete knowledge of the world.

What attitude should we have towards these images that have been annotated, stamped “anonymous”, “unretouched, “annulatto” or even “refused”? Has this deprived them of their very essence as photography?

What might be the essence of an anonymous photograph? The absence of signature or stamp, or rather its fate? Both perhaps. This is why I prefer the term “deposed photographs” to “anonymous photographs”.

I like to keep in mind Marcel Duchamp’s singular and modern idea that it is the viewer who makes the work as much as the artist. Some photographs show us things, these ones make us think.

“The media have replaced the ancient world” – Marshall McLuhan

Here it is above all the photographic object that is omnipresent before the image. Albumen papers, ferrotypes, cyanotypes, gelatino-bromide prints, all have their roots in the social finality assigned to them – family portrait, documentation, advertisement, archive, self-portrait, souvenir snap – and their escheat came with the loss of this use and the individual and collective memory to which they were attached. All these images found themselves without a master and thus lost the privilege of being looked at.

A host of anonymous images built up around a charming Utopia, one full of potentiality and the permanent anxiety that the discovery of a new image would upturn this precarious equilibrium. A collection is a construction of knowledge, in competition with no other. It is the portrait of the person who assembles it, of someone who recognises where others have been blind.

Despite belonging irremediably to the past, these photographic objects seem to be no longer located in that history and produce the strange sensation that we all share this same humanity. Although the present-day replacement of an image by a simple binary signal renders these afterimages of the past even more desirable, the idea of recovering this lost world unfortunately seems unreal.

Paradoxically, in this digital era of continuous production of shared imagery, which we consume and sometimes delete even before seeing, the abundance of anonymous photographs instils in us the idea of an omnipresent, primitive humanity whilst definitively sealing its demise.

This new optical reality has radically overhauled the concept of beauty that has been the norm since antiquity. The anonymous photographer thus becomes the implacable tourist of the real, of a reality in which each and every image becomes a projectile.

The beautiful is always surprising, wrote Rimbaud. Welcome to a world in which it will always be ten past ten, a world whose protagonists all seem to be acting out the same scenario of the pose, of dressing up, of mise en scène, in which impossible realities become convulsive beauties charged with unexpected artistic potentialities.

Jean-Luc Godard said that what interested him in Pierrot le Fou was the space between people, the paths they take, and that the “tragic” is that once we know where they are going, who they are, everything is still just as mysterious and life is that forever unresolved mystery.

“I am at war with the obvious” – William Eggleston

In this little inventory à la Prévert, it is not just a question of considering the formal evolution of the landscape, portrait or still life in the work of Eugène Atget, August Sander, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston and Wolfgang Tillmans.

What is curious here is the realisation that within this heterogeneity and constant profusion of imagery the concept of photographic unity has never been as strong, that the question of photography as an artistic medium and the status of the photographer as author were considered long before artists such as Gerhard Richter, Bernard and Hilla Becher, Francis Alÿs and Christian Boltanski.

In the end, could the history of photography be that immense “work in progress”, the creation of an acceptable world, of that illusion of continuity that man has of himself, or the transformation of this “hidden” reality into a continuum of images in the grand enterprise of recycling reality?